This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:    AE automatic exposure    AWB automatic white balance    CCD charge coupled device    CMOS complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor    CSI camera serial interface    DPCM differentially pulse coded modulation    FPS frames per second    HDR high dynamic range    HW hardware    ISP image signal processing    LSC lens shading correction    MIPI mobile industry processor interface    MPix million pixels    PCM pulse coded modulation    SW software
A demosaicing procedure is used in an imaging pipeline to convert mosaic data into full color image data where complete RGB values are specified at each pixel location. Generally, the steps before the demosaicing step are referred to as being in the RAW domain, and the steps after the demosaicing step are referred to as being in the RGB domain. Processing done in RAW domain can be understood as a pre-processing step(s). Demosaicing is a process of translating a pixel array (e.g., a 2×2 Bayer array) of primary colors into a final image which contains full color information at each pixel.
Image processing architectures have typically experienced size versus performance and quality compromises. As a general rule, simultaneously achieving high image quality and high performance has not been achievable or feasible in a single implementation. While this problem is present for traditional use cases, such as still image capture and video image capture, it will become even more of a problem as new use cases evolve.